


Concentration

by JohnAmendAll



Category: Doctor Who (1963)
Genre: Awesome Victoria Waterfield, Classic Who companions are awesome, Community: dw_straybunnies, Gen, Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-13
Updated: 2013-02-13
Packaged: 2017-11-29 04:36:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/682842
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JohnAmendAll/pseuds/JohnAmendAll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Trapped in Düsterenwald Castle, Victoria and Christabel try to make their escape.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Concentration

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the [dw-straybunnies](dw-straybunnies.livejournal.com) [Twelve Prompts of Christmas](http://dw-straybunnies.livejournal.com/35395.html). Prompt 2, "vampire fic".
> 
> This is a relatively self-contained scene. One day I hope to write the rest of the story it belongs to.

_It's all up to me now,_ Victoria thought, not for the first time. Ahead, the passageway branched again; she skidded to a halt, leaned against the rough stone wall, and listened. For a few moments, she could hear nothing save her own ragged gasps. Then, as she recovered her breath, she heard the hurried sound of Christabel's footsteps behind her, echoing off the stones of the keep. 

Christabel came into view, one hand pressed to her side, the other clutching a handful of her voluminous skirt. Her face was red with exertion, her damp hair plastered to her forehead. Doubtless Victoria was in no position to criticise her on that score. Briefly and irrelevantly, she remembered her governess telling her that young ladies did not perspire: they merely glowed. Victoria begged to differ. Like Christabel, she was quite definitely doing both. 

Victoria motioned to Christabel to join her. As the blonde came to a halt, the sound of her footsteps died away, and so did most of the echoes. But not all of them. Somewhere, not too far away, someone was heading in their direction, with a slow, unhurried step. 

_Someone_ , Victoria couldn't help thinking, _or some thing_. 

She listened for a few more seconds. It was hard to track sounds in this maze of bare, winding passages. The footsteps might be coming from behind, or the right-hand turning, but almost certainly not the left. There was no time to lose. Taking Christabel by the hand, she set out down the left-hand fork. Christabel followed, doing her best to keep up. 

_She trusts me._ Victoria tried to stop her thoughts going down that route, but to no avail. _She trusts me and she thinks I'll save us both and I won't be able to. I know I'll let her down. Oh, Doctor, where are you?_

They rounded another corner. Ahead, the corridor ended in a blank wall, to which a rusty iron ladder was bolted. To left and right were doors, their polished wood dark with age and studded with iron nails. A few seconds' experiment was enough to confirm that they were locked. Wherever the ladder went, that was the only way. 

Victoria caught hold of the ladder and began to drag herself up it. The ironwork seemed to flex alarmingly even under her modest weight, and the rungs, scabrous with rust, bit at her hands. Her dress caught on every minor projection, but she paid it no heed. She looked up: the ceiling was black with soot, but it was possible to discern the outlines of a trapdoor. She allowed herself briefly to toy with the notion that it would lead to the outside – perhaps a battlement or a flat roof – and freedom. But it was far more likely that it would be locked, and she and Christabel would both be sitting ducks. 

The trapdoor was above her now. Keeping her left arm locked around the ladder, she pushed at the trapdoor with her right. Like the surrounding ceiling, it had a patina of soot, and her hand slid fruitlessly across the surface. Victoria took a deep breath, and tried again. This time, rusty hinges creaked, and the trap opened a few inches. Another heave, and it opened wide enough to admit her head and shoulders. She looked down into Christabel's upturned face, beckoned her to follow, and climbed through the trapdoor. It took all her strength to force her billowing skirts through the narrow opening. 

It was no flat roof or battlement that met her gaze. The room was lightless, or nearly so, the gleam of torchlight from below giving only a vague impression of clutter. An attic, Victoria supposed, inside one of those cone-shaped turrets the keep sported. 

As Christabel came in reach of the trapdoor, Victoria bent down, half-helped, half-dragged her through, and pushed the hatch shut behind her. 

"What do we do now?" Christabel asked. Any suggestion of precedence over Victoria – whether by age, rank or even height – had long since vanished. 

Victoria took a deep breath, and tried to think like the Doctor. It did not come easily to her. 

"We should find something heavy to block the trapdoor," she said. "And then look for another way out, I suppose." 

"But it's too dark. I can't see a thing." 

"I agree. But unless you have a light–" Victoria broke off. "I believe I have one." 

She checked her sleeve. Despite the running and climbing she'd had to do, Zoë's torch was still there. Victoria pulled the slender rod out, and pressed the switch. A cold blue-white light shone from one end. 

"Whatever is that?" Christabel asked. "It is like no lantern I have seen." 

"I believe it is called an LED torch," Victoria said. _Not that it was any help to poor Zoë,_ her doubts inwardly added. "We must block the trapdoor. And see what else may be found here." 

Victoria wasn't sure what she would have expected to find in the attic of such a castle as this. But as she swept the beam of the torch around, and realised what most of the lumber was, she could see it made a sickening kind of sense. The chests, the rucksacks, the trunks, the bags– these were all that remained of previous visitors to the keep. How many had come here over the years, never to be seen again, and their possessions heaped up in this dark, forgotten space? 

She shook her head. There was no time for woolgathering. 

"We must pile these chests on the trapdoor," she said. "And search for anything that may be useful to us." 

With desperate haste, the two heaped the heaviest items they could find on the trapdoor. Then Victoria made a hasty search for alternative exits, finding none. The tiled roof of the turret was complete and unbroken, the tiles so closely interlocked that nothing larger than an ant could have escaped between them. And the only trapdoor in the floor was the one by which they had entered. 

Something thumped the underside of the trapdoor. 

"Ladies, I suggest that you open this door and come out," an urbane male voice called from below. A shudder of recognition ran through Victoria: it was Lord Zarvan. Instinctively, she took a step toward the hatch, feeling unable to disobey. Then she caught hold of herself, and returned to her search. It wasn't that Zarvan didn't frighten her – he did – but the thought of what she might become if she obeyed him terrified her more. 

"Come out and give yourselves to me, and perchance I may let you join my family," Zarvan's voice continued, still calm and persuasive. "Cower in the shadows like mice, and you will become food. Nothing more." 

"Victoria?" Christabel's voice was desperate, pleading. The blue glare of the torch made all faces look pale, even corpse-like, but the expression of terror on Christabel's face was no trick of the light. "Victoria, what are we to do?" 

Victoria delved for some comforting phrase the Doctor had used when she'd asked a similar question, and came up empty-handed. 

"I don't know," she said. "But we should keep away from the trapdoor." 

Christabel accordingly picked her way through the litter of past travellers' baggage. As she did so, her trailing skirt snagged a trunk that stood precariously balanced on end. It tumbled, bursting open on impact and scattering the effects of some hapless traveller far and wide. 

Instinctively, Victoria bent down to clear up the wreckage. 

"Christabel, I'm sorry," she said. "I thought we could help you and your sister. And all we've done is put you in the same situation as her." 

"You did all you could," Christabel said. 

"We were stupidly over-confident," Victoria insisted. "We should have believed what those people said at the village. And now it's..." 

Her hand closed around something: a glass disc, by the feel of it, double- sided and attached to a small stand. 

"What is it?" 

"Oh, nothing." Victoria stood up. "At least it isn't broken, or we'd have seven years' more bad luck." 

"It's a mirror?" 

"That's right." A vague memory stirred in her head. "A shaving mirror. Christabel, I wonder..." 

*

The trapdoor flew open, as if the travelling chests stacked on top of it had been no more than soap bubbles. Still moving slowly, giving menace time to sink in, the slender outline of Lord Zarvan rose into the attic from the corridor below. 

Once in the attic, Zarvan turned, still slowly, until he faced the girl Victoria. She was standing close to the outer edge of the chamber, illuminated by the pale glow of the torch she held clasped in both hands. The other girl was not immediately in sight – doubtless she was hiding behind some heap of discarded luggage – but it would only be the work of minutes to discover her hiding place. 

"Please don't do this," Victoria said. She was trembling, but the words came out calmly. 

"Why should I not?" Zarvan took a step towards her, kicking a fallen valise out of the way. "To me, you are no more than cattle." Another step. "It is I who decide your fate." Another step. "You both know what could have been given you." 

"I saw what you did to Zoë." She winced at the memory. "I don't want to be like that." 

"Miss Waterfield, you no longer have any choice in your destiny." He took another step forward. He was nearly in arm's reach of her now. His face expressed the same insatiable hunger that Zoë's had, and in his open mouth, fangs gleamed. 

Victoria swallowed. "Nor in yours," she whispered, and stepped aside. 

Behind her, a single tile had been knocked out of position, admitting a ray of sunshine into that dark, forgotten place. It angled down onto a carefully-arranged stack of boxes, and struck a collection of small mirrors, the shaving mirror among them. All these had been meticulously positioned and arranged to focus all the sunlight that fell on them onto one particular point. 

The point where Zarvan stood. 

The converging beam of light struck the vampire in the chest, seemed to pierce him. For a moment his hands reached out towards Victoria: then he threw his head back and screamed, a long, dreadful howl of agony. His body blackened, shrivelled, collapsed to the floor in a heap of ashes and scorched bones. 

Christabel, one hand to her mouth, rose from behind the boxes, where she had been adjusting the mirrors to keep the reflected sunlight in the right place. 

"I hardly believe it," she said, half to herself. 

"You had better," Victoria replied. She looked as if she was on the point of being sick, but her voice was still calm and distant. "Come. We must remove more of these tiles, enough that we can climb out." 

"But..." Christabel tried to make something coherent of the questions welling up in her mind. "How came you by such knowledge of optics?" 

"My poor father taught me." Victoria fell silent, picturing happier times: splitting the light of the sun with prisms, or concentrating it to burn paper, all under the watchful eye of her father. "He was always very interested in optics. Too much, indeed." 

She turned away, picked up a small box, and began hammering at the tiles, trying to enlarge the small hole they had made. 

"I suggest that you close the trapdoor, and block it again," she added. "Who knows how many of those creatures there are in the castle?" 

"But now we can destroy them. Can we not?" 

Victoria shook her head. "Only while we have the sun. After that, we are entirely at their mercy once more." 

"Then what can we do?" 

"Try to remain alive for as long as possible. Perhaps long enough that the Doctor or Jamie or the girls can find us." Victoria tugged at a broken tile, and managed to pull it free. "For now, that is all I can suggest." 

She peered out through the hole. Already, the sun was nearly on the horizon. Time, it was clear, was not on their side. 


End file.
